Kendrick Shoji Dreams of Figurines
Kendrick Shoji Dreams of Figurines
NYC-based tattoo artist Kendrick Shoji is ramping up his practice in 2024.
Before he decorated bodies, tattoo artist Kendrick Shoji spent his childhood summers decorating rocks with his sister, Isabella Shoji. Their babysitter, an aspiring preschool teacher, tested her future arts and crafts lessons on Kendrick and Isabella, asking them to find the rocks, paint them, and display them in rows in the garden.
Now, as a full-time tattoo artist based out of Ridgewood, Queens, Kendrick’s canvas has changed.
“I'm doing something that requires a lot of trust from people for me to actually work on their body, which to this day still feels wild,” Kendrick said. “I'll be sitting there like, ‘Damn, this person is really letting me carve up their skin with ink,’ and I'm extremely grateful for every person who walks in my door and lets me do that.”
Kendrick specializes in hand poke, or stick’n poke, tattoos, which involve a needle, not a machine. He tattoos his original art, flash, and customs in his at-home studio, and has recently begun expanding his clientele, beyond friends and mutuals, to the general public.
Although he has been tattooing since early 2022, Kendrick still considers himself an “artist in progress.”
“I've always loved to draw ever since I was young, but I never really took it seriously,” Kendrick said. “I never really thought of myself as that talented at drawing.”
Kendrick’s tattoos exude a softness, as his work leans into hand poke and the shading consists of small dots, resembling pointillism. He tattoos deers running side by side, a little boy tired from reading, a sweet three-headed dog, and wizards making potions. His figures resemble storybook characters, hoping to leap from page to skin. One recent tattoo, an angel with wings, has become Kendrick’s new favorite.
A former chef and filmmaker, Kendrick found his way to tattooing when he was living in a small, rural town in upstate New York after graduating college. Living alone, Kendrick sought out creative projects to pass the time as he applied for jobs. On the weekends, Kendrick commuted back to the city to see friends, and on one trip, tried to get a tattoo from an artist when the appointment fell through.
“I was getting kind of frustrated, and another one of my friends had mentioned that they were looking into trying stick’n poke for fun and I was like, ‘Fuck it, I'll do it too. I really need a new hobby.’” Kendrick said. “It pretty quickly just spiraled from there. I just really liked it. It felt very intuitive.”
For Kendrick, tattooing was a tactile art – it felt more like sculpture or being in a kitchen more than it felt like drawing.
“In an alternate universe, I'd be a chef or filmmaker, but tattooing has provided me the best of all of those worlds where I'm still in a visual medium and creating visual art, but I also have the comfortability of working by myself in my own space and creating something a little more intimate,” Kendrick said. “[Tattooing is] kind of like food, or kind of like being in a kitchen, and also being able to work with my hands which is awesome.”
In the beginning, Kendrick would tattoo himself once a week to practice before he began sharing his new hobby with the world.
“After a while, I was showing my friends [and] they were like, ‘Oh, give me a tattoo,’” Kendrick said. “I thought, maybe this is actually something that I could be good at.”
Eventually, Kendrick moved back to the city where he honed his drawing skills while working as a barista. He decorated coffee cups and drew on anything he could get his hands on.
“I swear, sometimes I feel like I've [had] all my best creative ideas when I'm working,” Kendrick said. “The last job I had, I was able to write out my lunch order and always do a little drawing for them – the people in the kitchen – and for a while, they hung up all my drawings.”
With the kitchen gallery in full swing, Kendrick made art in-between customers, taking photos of his best work. One drawing, his “sleepy boy,” would eventually find its way into his flash.
In June of 2023, Kendrick quit his job to seriously pursue tattooing, advertising his work online through Instagram, and moving into a new apartment. Since then, he’s been seeing clients, maintaining a clean space, and regularly putting out new flash.
“It's been going surprisingly pretty well,” Kendrick said. “I can definitely feel it's slowly starting to ramp up but I've been enjoying taking my time with it, [going] slow, and not trying to bite off more than I can chew.”
Throughout his budding tattooing career, Kendrick’s family is proud that he has continued to tap into his childhood creativity. Kendrick’s mother, Antoinette Bruno remembers Kendrick’s funky camp pottery as a kid, and has been excited to watch Kendrick “[pour] his heart into his craft” as he adds to his tattooing portfolio. His sister Isabella has been inspired by Kendrick’s new business and his leap of faith.
“I’m super excited for him that he has built this client base up and he's doing more and more tattoos and I just think it's so cool,” Isabella said. “It's such an awesome thing to do something that you're passionate about. I feel like a lot of us don't get that opportunity anymore. We kind of just have to work and do something to make money, so it's really great for him that he gets to do something that he loves to do.”
Kendrick’s childhood friend Ewan Creed said he is in awe of Kendrick’s new path, after seeing Kendrick’s creative energy manifest through their shared love of skateboarding in their teenage years.
“We were both using skating as a space to be creative and artistic,” Ewan said. “With skateboarding, it is a sport, but there's a very stylistic approach to it and everyone does tricks differently and has different ideas of how they want to skate.”
Ewan said Kendrick took pride in decorating his board, a space that some skaters neglect, using grip tape and other supplies to treat the board like a piece of art. With tattooing, Ewan sees a similar creative force.
“He'll just go for it when he has an idea or he wants to test something,” Ewan said. “With tattooing especially, that's just such a bold move, because that stuff's not going away. I think it's interesting that he can treat his body like this ongoing art project.”
Ewan got his first and only tattoo from Kendrick when he was still practicing: a custom tattoo based on a William Wegman drawing.
“He killed it. He did super well,” Ewan said. “I’m glad it was him that got to do it. Now when I look at it, I can be like, ‘That was my friend.’”
So far, Kendrick has continued with hand poke tattoos, a more traditional style that has gained more popularity in recent years.
“A lot of different cultures have their own version of [hand poke]. Japan is definitely one famous subculture of hand poke tattoos,” Kendrick said. “In the States, it went from this super niche [thing] – pretty much just kids in bedrooms with needles on toothpicks, or popsicle sticks – but I've noticed in the last 10 years, it seems like it's really boomed as this pretty big subculture of tattooing.”
As an art-form, tattooing is always evolving, through people and styles. Though Kendrick alone holds his needle, he said that all tattoos are collaborative, involving the opinions of the artist and the canvas.
“With every client I've had so far, there's always like a big back and forth,” Kendrick said. “I've been incredibly shocked and surprised with how much I trust I feel like people [have] given me off the bat.”
Before he tattoos someone, Kendrick said he reminds himself to breathe.
“As soon as I start, I can't really go back,” Kendrick said. “I always have a moment where I'm like, ‘I wonder if I could just quit right now, what would happen? How bad would it be?’ But obviously, I can never do that.”
For his flash, Kendrick draws inspiration from Tintin, a childhood favorite, as well as animals, porcelain figurines, and photos he takes of art and sculptures around the city. Producing flash pages regularly has been demanding for Kendrick as he is still working on defining himself as an artist.
“I'm having to fill my day to day with just drawing and being a disciplined artist,” Kendrick said. “It's definitely making it hard to be consistently creative, versus when I was working at a coffee shop and struggling to find time to draw, I felt like that was when I was at my best. Trying to learn how to create that environment naturally and not out of stress has been an interesting adventure.”
Outside of tattooing, Kendrick said he hopes to continue his multidisciplinary interests by doing silkscreen printing, sculpture, and making clothes.
“I would love to make little figurines out of my flash drawings, that'd be so fun,” Kendrick said. “Sometimes I think I'm just tattooing so I could one day make figurines, because I can't imagine that I’ll actually make money, but all I want to do is make little clay figures.”
According to Kendrick, many other tattoo artists also pursue outside artistic pursuits, partially out of financial necessity.
“I see so many tattoo artists that also make clothing or also make Zines and also do XYZ,” Kendrick said. “As an artist, you kind of have to be diverse to really make money.”
In the new year, Kendrick hopes to nudge his way farther into the vast NYC tattoo scene, meeting other artists and exploring its different pockets.
“I have been meeting some people through trading tattoos,” Kendrick said. “I got clothes for a tattoo, definitely down to receive some fun articles of clothing, so if you got a creative trade, I'm super open to that.”
An artist himself, Ewan said that being freelance is not easy, but hopes that Kendrick is able to support himself and expand his business further.
“I want to see him be more vocal and meet up with more tattoo artists, do collabs, and have more clients,” Ewan said. “I just want to see him succeed at doing what he's trying to do.”
Isabella said she recently decided that she would let Kendrick give her a tattoo.
“I told him he could design it,” Isabella said. “We would come up with something really cool and I would totally let him do that.”
For now, Kendrick is taking appointments, keeping his space clean, and wants new clients to know that he is open to doing custom tattoos and existing drawings in addition to his own flash.
“I think I'm a good tattoo artist. I think I have a nice, soft, gentle hand,” Kendrick said. “I think I could really do some great tattoos and I think we'd have a great time together. I have a good playlist.”
You can view Kendrick’s work and contact him via Instagram @young_cocoa_nut_chanel. He is currently accepting bookings.
Photos are courtesy of Kendrick Shoji.
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